


Bohemian Rhapsody (The Fall)

by soft_october



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: First Meetings, M/M, Pre-Fall (Good Omens), Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 08:16:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20239666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soft_october/pseuds/soft_october
Summary: What is it, when an angel falls?The despair upon waking to find that someone who loved you in dreams has been traded for a cold space in the bed beside you. The indescribable grief when an adult who once lifted you into their strong and capable arms is made weak and bent by age and can no longer recognize your face. The ache as you sit, trapped in the tangled snarl of your own emotions, trying to reach out, to touch, being met with only ash and dust and misunderstandings. The loss of certainty, the loss of innocence, the pain of understanding solitude for the first time and faced with the prospect of its constancy for all eternity."I only ever asked questions. That's all it took to be a demon, in the old days."





	Bohemian Rhapsody (The Fall)

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first of at least a dozen stories in a series based on the Queen's Greatest Hits I & II albums, because, as a great man once said, god has cursed me for my hubris and my work is never finished. This series will cover the events from the fall to post-apocalypse and will be Aziraphale and Crowley centric.

He knows he shouldn’t. 

He’s spun galaxies like sugar, gently blown life into stars, delicately painted planets and set them in precarious and uncertain orbits, and yet of all the celestial bodies the angel whispers into being, all the magnificent shining wonders that would be the envy of others if they were allowed to express such a base emotion, the angel is most fond of the moons. 

Earth’s moon, the one he knows will inspire poems and songs and wistful wishings on lonely nights (he saw some of the plans, he wasn’t supposed to but he had to _ know _, and he peeked when he hoped She was busy elsewhere) is a particular favorite of Hers, but there are others, thousands of them, blasted by craters, pock-marked, oblong and strange, trapped within the orbit of a planet which has itself been allowed by gravity to draw up tight and spherical, lit only by the glory of nuclear fusion inside one of his own perfectly formed stars. He didn’t look much further than a bit past the beginning, when he chanced a glance at the plan, but, if humanity should one day turn their eyes toward the skies, devise ways to look beyond the limits of their own sight, he hopes his other moons will capture humanity’s artistry and imagination, will inspire them past the limits of their own atmosphere. 

The humans. 

He recalls Morningstar waxing rhapsodic about them, about God’s new plans for them, and while he doesn’t - it’s not that he quite agrees, not really, but it just - well, there’s no harm in listening, at least, no harm in asking a question or two. He wonders if Lucifer, like him, caught a few lines of the plan, knows what she’s got in store for all of them. The angel can’t inspire others like Morningstar can, can’t whip them into a frenzy of fury and holy indignation in defiance of Her and their own design. He asks his own questions, but he keeps them between himself and, he supposes, Her, though she never answers him, no matter how many times he asks. 

He doesn’t think she likes them very much, these questions of his. 

But he _ can _ ask them, and that is _ precisely the point! _Why bother making the angels, demanding perfection and obedience and yet leaving them with their own free will only to punish eternally at the first sight of offense, only to start all over again with a new race entirely, with the covenant promised that they should be forgiven again and again? Why should the world be created where the humans were allowed to grow and change and adapt when he could expect nothing but servitude and compliance with an ineffable will for the rest of eternity? Why doesn’t heaven have better music than these blasted celestial harmonies, rendered in sonorous perfection each and every moment but lacking a single ounce of feeling or depth or yearning, why doesn’t it make his soul wish to rise up with its crescendos, diminish and despair as it slips into a minor key? (It never does, except when someone misses a note, and he delights in this small missteps in the tapestry of bland musical perfection.) 

No, the angel will take the moons over the stars, thanks all the same. 

He’s happy to be so far from the thick of it today, all the shouting and squabbling over Her decisions between those who will obey without thought and those who believe there might be a different way. (Not a better way, he tells himself, he would never stoop so low as to claim any way was better, just that there might be alternate ways to go about it, and might those differences be worth looking into?) 

Though there isn’t a single moon to be pulled out of the ether today. 

It’s stars all down the docket, and the one he cups in his hands softly glows as he pushes and spins the wisps of dust and gas, swirling them together with his infinitely careful fingertips, ensuring hydrogen begins its laborious process of being transmuted into helium before setting it into the sky with a final twirl. He breathes again once he takes his hands away, for the placement is always the trickiest part, getting all the fiddly bits of existing gravitational fields to bend to the will of his new star, his Alpha Centauri, some humans will call it, though not for a very, very long while. It twinkles in his sight for a moment, cold despite the heat and pressure with which he formed it. Something is missing, he realizes, as he watches its gentle revolution in the sky. Its too big, perhaps, or too alone. It needs - 

No one is around. No one will know if he just - 

With steady hands he draws it from the orbits its been placed within, grasps either side of star and slowly - slowly, pulls them apart, cells dividing, mitosis, two from one, though not a perfect fit. That’s alright then, one can be a little smaller than the other. He sets them into the sky then, closer than his others, dancing a delicate waltz to the music of the spheres, and, for the briefest of moments, the angel smiles, (he’s done it, he made his own choice) the tension pulled from his shoulders: content. 

That’s when the bottom drops out from underneath him. 

He doesn’t understand, at first, why the stars are falling away from him, and he thinks he has perhaps stumbled, cries out in shock and surprise, but there’s no softness supporting at his back. His wings snap forward, forced there by the wind spiraling past his ears so fast - too fast - and the edges of the primary feathers begin to smoke and smoulder, like a comet too close to a sun, or a meteor caught by a planet’s orbit, a falling star streaking across the heavens, his disjointed mind continues to catalog, even through the haze of fear and panic churning a swath through him. 

What is happening? He knows what this is he knows the words but never has he known this, this terror, never before - He must reach out for the Host and then he will understand maybe he won't understand completely She never answers like he wants he knows she doesn't like all the questions he asks but this time will be different this time she has to answer she has to know what he’s feeling and even if she doesn’t he can at least feel warm again and not so - No. 

It’s not there. 

It’s not there. 

_ It’s not there. _

What is it, when an angel falls?

The despair upon waking to find that someone who loved you in dreams has been traded for a cold space in the bed beside you. The indescribable grief when an adult who once lifted you into their strong and capable arms is made weak and bent by age and can no longer recognize your face. The ache as you sit, trapped in the tangled snarl of your own emotions, trying to reach out, to touch, being met with only ash and dust and misunderstandings. The loss of certainty, the loss of innocence, the pain of understanding solitude for the first time and faced with the prospect of its constancy for all eternity. 

Tears prick his eyes as he scrambles for purchase on nothing

He’s tumbling through the air now, arms and legs flailing, blackened wings flapping pathetically, the fire of his feathers trailing embers out behind them, a ghastly trail of their own, winking out one by one like dying stars and he is still screaming, though sharp surprise has turned to horror. What is happening, he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t know what he’s done wrong - was it Alpha Centauri? Was that the last straw, his defiance of her will? He will put it back together, he can do it right this time, it was just one mistake, he didn’t mean it - 

Through the roar of the wind in his ears he hears another sound, a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. He contorts in the air to see a twister of burning wings and convulsing limbs - all Morningstar’s lot, all those angels (not angels, not anymore, they’re becoming something new) with weapons in hand, falling, falling just like him, but falling together, as he falls alone. 

He will piece the puzzle together later. After the boiling sulfur, after the horror of seeing the gold in his eyes turned sick and strange, after Lucifer picks a new name and a new title, ‘better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.’ There will be time, so much time, time to understand, time to scab over the hurts, time to grow angry and bitter, time to put it all behind him and pretend he’s alright behind a pair of darkened glasses and a smile crumbling at the edges. Now all he knows is the gaping maw of pain blooming in his chest, the pitiful pleas pouring from his lips he knows will go unanswered (I’m sorry I didn’t mean it I’ll be good I promise I’m sorry I’ll do better I’ll be the best I’m sorry) as all his questions had before. 

Ah, well. 

The wind howls in his ears. 

Suppose he got his answer after all. 

The fall rips away his tears, robbing him even of the catharsis of their slow roll down his face. 

He is not the same when he emerges. 

He looks different, of course, smells different, feels dense and unnatural in this tight corporeal form, that’s all apparent from the word go, but there are other things, not first-glance suppositions and observations. He has a new name, (Crawly, as ill fitting as this new body) his old name vanishing into a hiss of static and buried along with the rest of the things he can not and will not think about, not until the wound and its scars are far away memories that can’t get him, and he thinks it will be a very long time indeed. 

The plants in Eden are like nothing he’s ever seen before, and he dawdles on his assignment, slithering over leaves and warm rocks on a scaly belly, watching the frolicking residents of the garden through these new eyes of his. He avoids the angel, who does little but wander around complimenting Her creatures and sampling the fruits of the garden, flaming sword left lying about for longer and longer lengths of time. Crawly could cause some trouble there, certainly, but then there might be a confrontation and he has no desire for that. Those blue eyes and white blonde hair only serve as reminders of things he lost, reminders that plenty of angels kept their heads down and never had a single thought that started with the word ‘why,’ that someone else is out there setting stars in the sky and they’ll never pull a star in two so it might not look so cold and lonely. 

It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Nothing matters at all. 

Tempting is easy, and there is a savage vengeance in his heart when he understands that Eve wants in ways that angels never did and demons won’t admit they do, and it’s so simple to ask her a few probing questions, validate those thoughts she would never admit to Adam or God. Then there is nothing for it but to watch as she reaches for the apple, as the dawn of awareness comes to her eyes. He doesn’t need to see any more after that, and he slithers off to sun himself on a cool rock, defiant, wondering if the almighty will come for him once she boots the humans from the garden, preparing little speeches, practicing them in his head over and over again until they don’t resemble words at all. 

She doesn’t come. He wonders if She even noticed him there. 

These words have to go somewhere though, he’s spent the better part of an afternoon thinking about them, and is loathe to see them go to waste. The angel it is then, and he creeps up on him, changes out of his snake form, dares the angel to spout some nonsense about him, his wings, his eyes, the evil smell that radiates off of him that won’t scrub off no matter how many times he tries. But the conversation is - Crawly wonders if - is _ this _ the angel she sent to guard the eastern gate? This soft thing with worried eyes and full of - all these unspoken questions? 

Ah. 

Oh no. 

A distant, broken part of him remembers spinning suns that shone like the gold of Aziraphale’s hair, planets with oceans reflecting skies as blue as those eyes, and none of them could compare to the leap in Crawly’s newly acquired heart when the angel confesses what he’s done with the sword he always leaves lying about, confessing his sin to a demon of all things, hoping and praying it will be alright, and Crawly regrets the sarcasm the moment the words leave his mouth, is grateful when Aziaphale takes his words at face value, sees relief crinkle into his warm eyes. . 

For the second time in his existence, Crawly feels the bottom drop out from underneath him. 

His second fall is no more pleasant or less surprising than the first. 

Because perhaps something matters, after all. 

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the end of this story, dear readers, but not of the series, which should update here and there. Check out my other GO fics if you like (there's a healthy sampling of various AUs) and my Tumblr is [@soft-october-night](https://soft-october-night.tumblr.com/) if you'd like come by and say hello!


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